You need to look beneath the surface. There is a fundamental difference. In Web3, not everyone can post pictures, only those who are rich. Furthermore, it is decentralized. Decentralized! No government can take away your cat or anime waifu picture! Web3 is also more than that. It is a platform. VCs love platforms. On this platform, anyone can create money and claim it's worth something! If you do this right, you can cash out before anyone notices! Kind of like overvalued startups sold to clueless buyers, but without all the middlemen.
it's a bit like saying that with the discovery of threaded cotton, we will soon replace whatever it is we used to make clothing and make everyone pay premium for the new material, only the rich won't end up naked.
Yes some business models are money grabs, no face value add, but to represent the potential of web3 which itself is still unknown is an over simplification and focus on the bad side of what's been happening in the space.
don't brush the valuable uses cases
away. guaranteed immutability, integrity, and even anonymity, all of that through trustless networks that guarantee incentives for the maintainers of those network can't honestly be so narrowly represented.
Fun preview though of what will be mistakenly built on networks such as Eth that is nowhere near scalable for this kind of use case.
This is the first time I see a strawman as a website.
FYI modern chains cost less than a fraction of a penny to interact with (Avalanche, Matic, ICP) and some don't even require to pay anything (Ceramic). All these tired complaints are getting addressed and development is moving fast, it's about time the anti-web3 crowd catches up to it.
Also, I'd like the author to make welcome2web2, with popups, paywalls, ads and sudden user-hostile feature removal or UI redesigns meant to maximize profits... although it would be a pointless exercise, as one would just need to browse the web as usual to experience it.
The data is not held hostage by the centralized entities who serve you the UI.
If a website turns their UX user-hostile for whatever reason, one can simply build an alternative UI that interacts directly with the distributed data.
That's a little unfair. Niche hobbyists will build the alternative UI, and regular people can choose to use it. Like Youtube Vanced or all the Wordle clones (yes those are both normal web. open / accessible data is orthogonal to blockchain, IMO)
How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?
How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?
More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?
Social trust networks -- they get recommended by friends or shared online by someone you trust.
> How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?
Those same social trust networks -- someone realizes what's going on and shares it, people start telling other people to stop using it. There's no technological solution to prevent technological abuse -- the abuse can be built into the system, after all. Half the warnings about "stop using this site" are warnings about a first party UI -- "Facebook is reading your messages!" or "Youtube is hiding dislikes!" or whatever. Social networks (as in, networks of people, not websites) are the only way this sort of knowledge is ever spread.
> How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?
Not long, of course. I'm not sure if this is an argument in favor of Web3, though, since that can work the same way -- a startup needs to move fast and frequently change things to iterate, which means they will be changing the data representation on the blockchain frequently (going forward, of course they can't change past blocks), which means alternative clients will need to keep up with those data changes same as with API changes on a normal website.
> More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?
? Web3 is just as for-profit as the normal web, if not more since every database interaction is monetized? YT and the like aren't on it because there aren't that many users.
So you want average person to pay for every interaction they have with any given site. While leaving all the "bad stuff" of web2 on some random enthusiast to fix by "making their own site".
And that won't even fix things like Youtube hiding dislikes or Facebook reading your messages. Even if your TotalyFreeYoutubeWithNoAds.com delivers on what it advertises you still need to interact with Youtube's APIs and if those don't deliver out dislikes then there is nothing you can do about it apart from creating your own parallel database with dislikes, but then you can only show the ones that come from your instance of Youtube and not ones that come from actual Youtube or from FreeYoutubeNoAds.com.
I haven't yet seen a single reason why normal consumer would use web3 over web2. Why would I pay for the privilege of responding to you or for downvoting bad ideas? Only response is "magically overnight all web2 websites transfer over to web3", but you have to be really out of touch with reality if you think that will happen in the first place and if it happens actual enthusiast won't create replacements for free on web2.
Web3 is literally just another cryptobro scam like NFTs and it is sad that anyone falls for them.
Ah yes. Because network effects are not a thing, building an alternative UI is super fast, and the website cannot do the things it does today like obfuscating their data, or regularly changing the data format. This way your website keeps spending its time running after changes, and your two unpaid volunteers will absolutely easily catch up to an army of devs focused on a single product. And of course, copyright and other things will go away. Oh wait, no, that's what cryptobros are pushing for NFTs, that it's online enforcement of copyright. Okay, so the data that is now public (why the fuck would GIANT_COMPANY_A make their very important, very private data public?) but is still owned by its authors, you're going to take that and reformat it, redisplay it, without any license to do so ?
And that's the reason we have paywalls and ads crammed into every single square inch of screen estate and websites treating users as the product. And you tell me that isn't broken?
I'd be glad to pay a penny (or a fraction of it) for each comment on HN or whatever and have it fund the network (server hosting, staff, etc). Much better than the current alternative.
>I'd be glad to pay a penny (or a fraction of it) for each comment on HN or whatever and have it fund the network (server hosting, staff, etc). Much better than the current alternative.
Really? You'd prefer to pay for every single interaction on the web rather than be served an ad that you can block by the way anytime?
What about people that don't have the luxury to throw away their money like that, should the internet exclude poor people from participating?
Yes, I'd prefer to pay a fraction of a penny (which might go as low as $0.000001 for example) for each and every single one of my interactions, both read and write, and have it fund the decentralized network of data providers (servers, staff, users, ...) rather than have them try to extort money from me in predatory ways via ads, paywalls and the like. The fact you can block them only hides the problem and it's a pointless game of cat and mouse that only gets more and more devious.
Of course that expenditure has to be reasonable, ideally $1/day for intensive use or something affordable by everyone or trivially subsidizable, either externally or by participating in the network.
Costs ballooning out of proportion would be a problem of course, but the decentralized nature allows developers and users to move to another data provider once it proves it costs too much to operate (as it happened with Ethereum).
web3 is for the rich. can you get rich catering only to the wealthy? perhaps, if web3 also has a mechanism to perpetually tax the poor. something needs to keep trade flowing into their trade bloc. as it stands web3, if it were a country, would have. negative trade balance and no GPD (except for fees paid to miners and exchanges)
This comment I am making is not worth $.000000001 USD, it is worth exactly zero in whatever currency you want to denominate it in. $0 BTCH, $0 ETH, even $0 Zimbabwean Dollars. Take your pick.
It might even be worth a negative amount of currency since it is a mostly pointless comment and anyone who reads this has kind of had their time wasted. That is practically most of what is online IMO and why micro payments are an idea that have not and never will take off.
Hint: you'll pay a penny for the three sites that implement it (and who will make about 2 bucks a month out of it), and the majority of the web will still be massive corporations that will either stay on ads, or make you pay _and_ stay on ads.
Such bs. People like to be the inventor of new terms...
"web3" has *NOTHING* to do with 'web'. But hey, web2.0 was a blast in VC world.
If anything, web3 is more like the old internet without the web.. Distributed as in, everybody has a server in their pocket. It's your data, and you decide who has access to it.
> Distributed as in, everybody has a server in their pocket. It's your data, and you decide who has access to it.
That sounds nice. But what I read, web3 is intimitaley related to blockchains. I doubt that blockchains are necessary to obtain decentralisation and data ownership.
Well, people misuse this globally accessible permanent persistent database, which is controlled by static private keys to store data which is meant to be private, semi-private or and data which is supposed to be public for the time being.
The vehement shilling against anything blockchain related is something I still don't really get. Sure, I get it, you don't like blockchain. But this website would've taken a bit of effort to put together, and for what? To shit on something the author doesn't like? What's the author trying to get out of making something like this?
People hate blockchains because they're tired of the spam from cryptobros who have done nothing to create anything actually useful.
Bitcoin is destroying the environment while providing no real decentralization since most people don't run their own clients. Other shitcoins are either outright scams or vulnerable to client forks like when Vitaly stole 150 million dollars.
After not actually solving currency, cryptobros moved to selling random pixels and now want to make the web an even worse place.
Not everyone wants that.
> What's the author trying to get out of making something like this?
You'd be surprised, but not everyone is trying to run a get-rich-quick scheme.
I actually see more anti-crypto than pro-crypto "spam" nowadays (specially on HN) and I'm not wasting my time building overelaborated strawmen. Live and let live.
- Crypto is destroying the planet (it's not). A lot of people get irrationally mad about anything that causes any damage to the environment these days. Climate change is an incredibly important issue but the activism side of it is filled with a lot of crazy people and they've latched on to 'crypto' as bad when most don't know a thing about it.
- Jealousy. A lot of people got very lucky and very rich through crypto. They have so much ETH that can spend the equivalent of a persons expected lifetime earnings on a picture of a monkey. That's infuriating to a lot of people so much so they'll create websites that lack truth and nuance just to feel better about themselves.
It's understandable, but it's sad. Instead of HN being full of posts with people trying out new tech for the fun of it, we get endless miserable tirades from people trying to suck the joy out of life.
I wouldn't be so adamant about cryptocurrencies crap if they would just do their thing and be quiet about it. But everything ever built by that scene needs to somehow make or cost money in some form or another, and that's a telling sign for me.
Also, most cryptocurrencies in fact do commit towards warming up the planet for no benefit at all. Don't know why you deny this.
>> I wouldn't be so adamant about cryptocurrencies crap if they would just do their thing and be quiet about it.
Why do people need to be quiet for you? There's plenty of media I don't want to read and I don't read it. I don't try to silence it because it upsets me.
>> everything ever built by that scene needs to somehow make or cost money in some form or another, and that's a telling sign for me.
Making money directly by creating or building something was the norm until we started paying for it with our data. Paying for things directly and compensating creators doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
>> Also, most cryptocurrencies in fact do commit towards warming up the planet for no benefit at all. Don't know why you deny this.
I don't deny it but it's much more nuanced than that. As a society we do A LOT of unnecessary things which contribute to global warming and we don't get upset about them. Get off your computer. Stop watching TV. Stop using electricity. We could all get upset at each other or we could work towards solutions that solve the problem and allow us to maintain our current lifestyles with only minor modifications. The people screaming that crypto causes climate change are the same people who think the trees they're planting are the solution to it. In reality it's a much more complex problem that's going to be solved by the
people that are too busy working on the possible solutions to waste time screaming. It's not black and white.
> A lot of people got very lucky and very rich through crypto. They have so much ETH that can spend the equivalent of a persons expected lifetime earnings on a picture of a monkey.
The word “equivalent” is doing a lot of work here; because if what you purchased was the nominal “rights” to a URL that may or may not 404 at any moment, you haven’t done anything worthy of jealousy.
Also, at the risk of breaking the HN rules on allegations of astroturfing: the whole narrative of “regular joes got super rich off this” is as turfy as it gets. I’ve looked at wallet balances, I understand a handful of these people exist. But I’ve never met one, and I doubt you have either. Some people win the lottery, too; I’m not losing sleep over it.
>> The word “equivalent” is doing a lot of work here; because if what you purchased was the nominal rights to a URL that may or may not 404 at any moment, you haven’t done anything worthy of jealousy.
Maybe I'm not explaining it clearly enough. The jealousy isn't that you've been rich enough to buy a picture of a monkey. It's that you have so much 'money' that you can spend it on something so stupid and not even care. And the fact that you've gotten that money by doing something so seemingly stupid and worthless in the first place. That's pretty infuriating for a lot of people.
It wasn't supposed to be a defence of crypto. I have no need to defend it and there are plenty of reasonable criticisms of it. I was just trying to explain the kind of unsubstantial attacks on 'crypto' we see frequently (e.g. this post). "You're jealous" may sound childish but that doesn't make it untrue.
Yes, thank you. I feel like this is just upvoted because the general feeling of HN = 'Blockchain bad'. But the message of this site is pretty ridiculous. It's telling the user that social media platforms built directly on ETH blockchain doesn't make sense because of the fees.
But..
a) who said that the point of web 3.0 is building social media platforms?
b) people in favour of blockchain tech already know that there are use cases that don't make sense to build on Layer 1 blockchains such as ETH, which is why there are numerous Layer 2 solutions being researched right now.
I understand that this is meant as satire but it is not an example of "web3" as intended - blockchain and digital assets are just two (optional) component of a web3 stack;
* can only be accessed through centralized DNS and Cloudflare (with no alternative way to get the front-end, e.g. ipfs, a git repo, or even a zip file with static assets that can be run locally)
* content only hosted on centralized server (unsplash.com / googleusercontent.com).
No sane person (even and especially the most ardent web3 proponents) would be proposing storing raw images on a blockchain for a use-case like this. There are far more suitable decentralized and/or distributed solutions for content distribution.
This is a strawman if I ever saw one.
https://web3.foundation/about/ (w3f skews heavily towards polkadot parachain solutions but look beyond the bias in their examples and it's quite representative)
This parody is quite funny, but it's actually a take on the micro-transaction model more than web3. Web3 sites could work exactly the same as web2 sites except for the bits people want to own themselves. I don't imagine many people care about owning a Like or a comment.
What's perhaps even more fun to think about is that somewhere in a lofty corner office at Instagram there's someone with a math or compsci PhD doing calculations to figure out exactly how much every Post, Story, Like and comment costs to post on Insta, and precisely how often an advert needs to be displayed to cover that. At least with micro-transactions there's no adverts (in theory I mean, of course there would still be adverts) and it's all very obvious how you're paying.
The cost to post (just an upload) is going to be a lot smaller in the long run than the cost for people to view popular content (tons and tons of bandwidth, some db access, etc.). So it's kind of a weird model to charge for posting or contributing. Really you'd want to charge for time spent viewing... and then you've basically invented AOL again.
I’m surprised they charge to post at all since the most likely approach to build this in real life would be to use a validium (stores data Offchain) and the cost to the network operators would be fixed and very cheap.
It’s a bit of both, really: although a lot of its commentary is about a the transactional model, it is at the least exacerbated drastically by the cost of actions which takes it far out of the micro-transaction level. If you compared it with a traditional database system that adopted cost-based micro-transactions, well, that one would actually be micro-transactions, at least several orders of magnitude cheaper, at which point a lot of the complaints the site is making barely apply by comparison.
Closed that fugly pop-up with bunch of description and dived head first into this magical land of Web 3.0. Looks like a page with bunch of stock photos. Can we skip it and go straight to v4.0?
Interacting with this website induced terror in me. Even accepting the use of cookies cost coins! Yes, it's making a strawman argument, but think of it like an interactive horror story.
It sparked an emotion and for me that makes something art.
Never forget that cryptocurrencies are essentially software, therefore it can most likely change to overcome its present pitfalls. You don’t like the negative environmental impact that PoW has? There are many eco-friendly cryptocurrencies that don’t use PoW. Don’t like that the fees are too high? There are feeless cryptocurrencies. Don’t like that many cryptos are VC money schemes? There are many with fair distribution, etc… You get the point.
This is why cryptos are here to stay. The underlying technology is valuable and the problems it may have today can be overcome.
It hasn't been overcome in 15 years but they will fix it soon. Sure...
Software isn't some magic that can wish away its shorcomings.
Also, do you think the next instagram that will most like support its own crypto will allow you to switch to a different crypto?
ETA: the transaction cost is based on the cryptocurrency, so if now the cost per transaction is 1 cent then in 10 years it might cost 10 dollars if the value of the coin goes up.
Because cryptocurrencies are dependent on the reliability of distributed systems and cryptography. Both concepts are extremely tricky, the only true way of validating them is by trying to break them and failing, this takes time. But the floodgates have been opened.
Also, who cares if there are several cryptocurrencies? If they have good properties (fundamentals) and people find them valuable, why not?
You don't get these tradeoffs for free though. Anyone can make a "crypto currency" that is entirely centralised and has no fees and minimal environmental impact. Nobody would use it. I think much of the desire of crypto comes from being decentralised, and I am yet to see a crypto that doesn't use PoW that doesn't just favor those who are already rich.
Well, I can honestly tell you such a cryptocurrency exists. Cryptocurrencies are byzantine-fault-tolerant consensus algorithms. These are tricky algorithms to get right, but I can assure you that Bitcoin is not the only viable solution. In fact, I don't understand people's pessimism. In the universe of all possible algorithms of this kind, known and unknown, I find extremely unlikely that Bitcoin-like ones would be the best and only possibility!
There you go. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay no matter how much they hate it or continue to waste time on repeating the same old arguments even though there are far better cryptocurrencies out there that already exist.
The fact that they are unable to ignore them and continue to spread the same debunked nonsense tells you that it is not going away and it is getting boring.
Just look at the first few sentences:
> a slow distributed, append only spreadsheet technology which is destroying the planet we live on.
So Solana, Stellar and Algorand are destroying the planet?
> Blockchain isn't new. It has been around for as long as the iPhone. Look how much the iPhone has changed the world. Blockchains one claim to fame in this period is the creation of $5.2B/year ransomware industry, societal damage in the form of gambling and the loss of irreplaceable photos.
The internet isn't new. Its 'killer app' (The world wide web) came decades afterwards and it took decades more for adoption. I don't know why one would try to use ransomware on transparent and traceable blockchains these days, where everyone can see where it is going, unless you are using 'privacy coins' which those are getting banned due to regulations.
All of that did not stop Stripe to continue supporting cryptocurrencies for payments [0], did it? It's really getting boring repeating the same old arguments from critics like Stephen Diehl [1] who is unable to ignore the whole thing after his failed blockchain startup venture Adjoint. [2] That's why he is grieving and wasting his energy towards cryptocurrencies.
> The internet isn't new. Its 'killer app' (The world wide web) came decades afterwards and took decades more for adoption.
The Internet started in the mid 1980s and became available to consumers in about '89[0]. The WWW was created in '90. By '94 it was wildly popular. Netscape IPOed the next year, with millions of users.
Generously, you could call that about 5 years from public availability to cultural dominance. Bitcoin has existed for three times that, and still doesn't have a use case that Beanie Babies didn't have.
I'm a believer in cryptocurrencies - or, I should say, in decentralised digital cash. But people like you are hurting it, not helping it. We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.
[0] Incidentally, David Chaum founded DigiCash, the first cryptocurrency company, the same year.
The first version of the internet was called Arpanet and it was apparently released in 1969 according to Wikipedia. It only became widespread in its current incarnation much later. Moreover, there was an immense amount of hype around the internet during the 90s that culminated in the dotcom bubble, wiping out most ventures and leaving only few companies which still exist today.
If you ask me, the story of the internet and cryptocurrencies seems pretty similar.
Yeah, Arpanet was definitely a wide-area network, but the Internet Protocol was standardised in '82 and that was what created the Internet: a public network that was capable of spanning the globe. (I used the words "became publicly available" advisedly!)
Aside from that, I very much agree with you. I think digital cash has great promise - I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard still being a thing in 20-30 years. Some implementation of digital cash - I happen to think Bitcoin and its current siblings are not fit solutions - seems highly likely to proliferate in actual means-of-exchange usage. (In plain English: for buying stuff at supermarkets.)
But I think people like the commenter above are the obstacle to progress. We need motivated but rational innovators, who can analyse solutions through clear eyes, soberly and without dysfunctional ego investment in one technology or another.
These weird crypto stans are not technologists, they're fanboys, they make real innovators look bad, and they retard real progress by dementedly screaming at anyone who makes cogent criticisms of a given implementation. Those critics are our greatest asset and friend, not our enemy.
There’s a reason I’m saying ‘digital cash’. I carry no water for current cryptocurrencies or blockchains. I’m interested in the goal, not any implementation (and what frustrates me about these crypto stans is their ego fixation on the implementation and the culture/brand/Lamborghinis over the goal).
As for credit limits: first off, Visa and Mastercard are payment systems - they don’t give you credit limits. Your card has ‘Visa’ or ‘Mastercard’ written on it, but it’s your bank that lends you the money to spend via V/M. I’m not proposing that the bank be replaced - I’m proposing that the payment system be replaced. Your bank will lend you money, and you will spend it using [tbd].
(BTW, I developed the lending algorithms at a unicorn startup bank. Billions in credit was dispensed by my code [and that of my reports]. I’m intimately familiar with that ecosystem. It’s not my central point here, but I do believe there’s substantial room for modernisation in that respect at almost every point in the chain: the CRAs, the lenders, the collections agencies, etc. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to expand, but right here I don’t want to distract from my actual point above.)
The web wasn't publicly available until 1992, which is why there was so much hype around it in the 90s. Both eBay and Amazon were started within two years of the web being opened as part of what started as the dot-com boom and became the dot-com bubble a few years later.
The time between the web opening and the end of the dot-com boom is about the same as the time between Bitcoin being announced and Ethereum going live, a period in which barely anyone used crypto and it had almost zero impact on the world. Even since then its wider impact is minute compared to what came from the dot-com boom.
Not one time in my sentence did I ever mention about Bitcoin. That one has already failed in being 'electronic cash' and it is now used as 'digital gold'. Not its intended purpose. The others that I mentioned have a much better future of being a 'digital cash' technology if used with a stablecoin.
> But people like you are hurting it, not helping it.
How exactly?
> We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.
I have just counter argued my points made with real examples and evidence and the only person arguing with emotion are the creators of the 'Welcome to Web 3.0' page. And yes, I can even critique the aforementioned cryptocurrencies since every technology still always has it issues.
But just don't repeat the same arguments that I have just refuted. It is boring and I am only interested in looking for new criticisms. All my earlier points and questions about it being, slow, 'destroying the planet', etc still remain unchallenged.
PoW also favors those who are already rich it's just abstracted by one layer of them having to buy rigs for mining farms, instead of being hard-coded in the same way as PoS.
The core of the issue is that PoW is fundamentally a sort of algorithmic cancer that threatens to basically take over on the order of half of the worlds computational power to fuel worthless speculative trading. IMO there's an important argument to be had that trading on PoW blockchains should be outright banned. Yes, you can't get rid of it completely, but you can get the impact down to a manageable level.. like with cancers.
And yeah, then you have PoS and PoA blockchains. But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could. PoA is fundamentally different from PoW and PoS, so you can argue whether it's even the same underlying thing. It's no longer truly decentralized. I think it could be very useful. It's just not as sexy and susceptible to fueling pyramid schemes, so it's less popular.
So to me it seems like we really don't know at all yet if the "underlying technology" is even providing a net positive value to society.
If the "underlying technology" here is trustless distributed blockchains (that is, PoA doesn't really apply), then I think there's an argument that the core of the idea is fundamentally broken. There is perhaps no such thing as a truly trustless system (for PoW/PoS blockchain, you're just converging on concentrating de-facto trust with a small clique of trading platforms and mining/wallet app developers), so maybe it's better to just be more explicit about where we're placing our trust (through solid cryptography if we can) and to make sure that those entities are democratic institutions worthy of our trust. But this quickly becomes a very deep and philosophical argument, so it's outside the scope of this comment.
I support further research and development into blockchain-related technology, I certainly think it could be truly valuable. But it's yet to be proven IMO.
> But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could.
Could you direct me to some of these arguments? My thought is the opposite, that something in the lines of PoS is more secure in the long-run because it tends towards decentralization. I guess the devil is in the details.
The main security difference is that with PoW any attempt to create a fork has a cost. With PoS, slashing can be used to impose a similar cost. But that doesn't work for very that long forks (longer than it takes for stakers to unbond), since the accounts being slashed might no longer exist on the main fork.
In order for validators to distinguish the main fork from any malicious long forks, they must start with a trusted checkpoint that's less than X days old, then sync at least every X days, where X is the unbonding period.
The "trusted checkpoint" notion seems to cause a lot of concern, but in my mind it's relatively harmless to just bake checkpoints into the client code (if done carefully - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370309). Most clients already have some form of trusted checkpoints (even Bitcoin Core does, though they're deprecated), or at least a genesis block, which is effectively a checkpoint.
> The underlying technology is valuable and the problems it may have today can be overcome.
I'm pretty sure that's been said about email and its encryption/validation problem. And while it's still used, other products have come in and eaten its biggest market - asynchronous communication.
Inertia's a bitch, and when you have millions of users, you can't change things willy-nilly. At least, not if you want the product to be viewed as legitimate.
Listen, people understand that technology has value outside of the scams and stupid memes. The problem is that crypto-evangelists seem to think that good intentions are all you need to build a functioning alternate economy. "Don't mind the bugs, we'll fix them later, for now entrust us with all of your money and information". It is precisely because it is flawed software that people hate on NFTs and blockchain and web3. Fix your shit and self-regulate before you promise the future to people who are already struggling in the existing economy.
Consider it like era's/decades. It doesn't have to be perfectly accurate but it gives you a rough idea of a point in time. When I think 'web 2' I think of Digg, Facebook, social media. At the time it was more of a buzzword but in retrospect it defines that era. It doesn't have anything to do with 'versioning' the web.
Maybe blockchains immutability is going to actually make people think twice before putting something online.
"Web2" makes us think that we can delete whatever we post, or what we send is not going to be stored. And we believe it because it is technically possible, even though we don't have any way to double check.
If a service claims that you can delete/hide whatever data you uploaded on the blockchain, you'd be able to verify it and not only trust them.
And if you are told that using this service, there is no way to delete it, and that anybody can see it, you might avoid doing something that you'd have done with web2 and regretted later.
>If a service claims that you can delete/hide whatever data you uploaded on the blockchain, you'd be able to verify it and not only trust them
Given that the the two most important features of a blockchain are decentralization and immutability how would any service ever be able to guarantee me that? That implies they own the blockchain, in which case it's just a slow database.
Definitely, yes! That was just a theoretical example to say that this kind of claim can be proven wrong very easily and publicly (probably not worded the best way though :))
It's all fun and games until a judge orders you to remove the content, like a revenge porn photo for example. You'll have plenty of time to think about how best to explain immutability, blockchains, etc. as you're sitting in jail in contempt of court.
The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.
> until a judge orders you to remove the content, like a revenge porn photo for example
Can a judge order you to do something that is not possible? For example, if you were offering an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, can the judge order you to provide a decrypted version of a user's correspondence?
> The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.
Yes, I think that's why Balaji Srinivasan is talking about "network states", and "layer 0" (the ideological and legal layer) of cryptocurrencies.
Contempt of court is an exceptionally powerful instrument. If the law says you must remove things on request, what were you doing putting stuff in a place that you couldn’t remove them? And if the law says you must provide such-and-such information to the police on presentation of a court order, “I can’t because I designed it so I couldn’t” is not an acceptable defence. So far, these things have been flying under the radar for the most part, but it wouldn’t take much for them to be explicitly banned on the grounds that they make it impossible to comply with law.
I like to think that GDPR did some good by completely ignoring technical limitations and going "no, just find a way to do it". It forced people to address some privacy concerns that no one cared about (like deleting someone's data off every record incl. backups) because it was a technical challenge with no money to make.
Web3 seems to work the opposite way. The tech works like that, so the world better adapt to it.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but for once I'm happy that it's not technicians that make the laws.
The new thing is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial).
With all the capital inflow thanks to the various crypto bubbles there is an insane amount of cryptography and distributed systems research going on to let us build general purpose decentralized databases in the future.
Once we get there, it’ll obviously change all of our assumptions about the internet which are based on companies controlling centralized databases.
Worked doesn't imply that they didn't solve it. You can still be CURIOUS and look up the patents :) Just because something is new for you (and lets be clear 14 years and counting isn't new) doesn't mean it's new for everyone.
Well, snarky comments like that are forbidden on HN better stay with the I am to gulible to search argument. The patent was filled in 1998 but I am not helping your CURIOUS mind any further. ;0)
Markov chains (cryptographic signatures on a linked list of transactions) have been around for much longer than 14 years. There's your "decentralized invariants on state transitions".
The "magic" provided by bitcoins was the "proof of work" part - basically trying to create only one "real" trusted branch of the markov chain at any point in time. But that "reality" has been broken multiple times by both the miners and the programers with voluntary and involuntary splits, double spends, etc.
Assuming you mean a Merkle tree (a Markov chain is a statistical concept). A Merkle tree provides an efficient way to compute hashes (not signatures) of data. It provides neither properties that you claim for Markov chains.
You're correct - Merkle tree. Words are hard some days.
> A Merkle tree provides an efficient way to compute hashes (not signatures)
A signature is a hash, in that it is effectively unique for the content. It simply has the additional property of being generated using cryptographic keys, proving that not only is the hashed content what's expected, it was generated using the specified key.
Signing and hashing are specific cryptographic operations with well defined properties. You can’t use them interchangeably if you want to be taken seriously.
A merkle tree that uses cryptographic signing instead of hashing is still a merkle tree.
Though if we really feel it's necessary, we could simply say "a merkle-tree like implementation that uses cryptographic signatures in place of a hash function".
Pedantry about the difference between hashes and signatures doesn't change the validity of the structure as a response to the original question.
I challenge you to build a Merkle tree using a digital signature scheme in place of a cryptographic hash function where a Merkle tree constructed by Alice can be used by Bob without revealing Alice’s secret key.
Alice and Bob both use asymmetric keys, and use one of a thousand different methods to exchange their public keys (hey, they can even go in the Merkle tree). Alice signs a transaction using her private key and publishes it. Bob can now use Alice's public key to verify the signature on the transaction. No private/secret key exposure.
Asymmetric encryption is a fairly well explored field, which is what makes the above both easy to reason about and secure.
If I have an IP address I can host anything and anyone anywhere on the internet can access it right now. There's no company controlled centralized database I have to get permission from to host an apache server with cat photos for example. Isn't this problem already solved?
The interesting part is state transitions (mutations). How would your Apache server coordinate mutations to your cat database with other servers when you need to enforce invariants like the maximum number of kittens a cat can have per year?
I'm hosting cat photos for friends to view. There are no invariants. There are no rules. It's purely content I'm posting for other people to consume. It's no different than if I printed photos and mailed them to all the people.
This is not a problem anyone has ever had. The entire world is running on either no coordinated mutations, or batched mutations that are spreading over time. If you're found not respecting the mutations that my Apache server has done, the only thing that happens is that you get banned or fined. Cryptobros see the world as absolutely unable of trust, when it's ran for millenia on it.
I can run Postgres with no cryptobro crap required. Huge advantage. If people don't want to trust my instance, then we can start signing blobs so my instance only shovels dumb data around that anybody can verify being authentic. If relationships are required to be verifiable, we can build a PKI.
> The entire world is running on either no coordinated mutations, or batched mutations that are spreading over time.
Every financial transaction that requires settlement between institutions is a “coordinated mutation.”
And while it is true that financial transactions are often synced between institutions via a “batched mutation” approach (especially when coordinating settlement), the delay that batched settlement represents, and the complexity that it introduces to the overall system, is extremely costly.
This is one reason why blockchains have the potential to be extremely valuable—both from a utilitarian point of view as well as from a financial point of view.
Imagine if you could get rid of batched settlement between institutions, because you just didn’t need to do it anymore. What would that be worth?
Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere from 10 minutes to upwards of 16 hours for minuscule volumes of transactions. It's not solving that problem for certain.
> extremely costly
The cost is built into the transactions. Just like it is with blockchain transactions. Now then, which has higher per transaction costs?
Assessing the future prospects of blockchain technology based on the performance characteristics of Bitcoin is like assessing of the future prospects of general computation based on the performance characteristics of the UNIVAC III.
As a factual matter, settlement costs are not fully embodied by transaction fees, and include such things as, for instance, financing and opportunity costs and the cost of supporting an organization that is more complex than it otherwise needs to be. If settlement delays were entirely eliminated, new business models would emerge that are not even possible under the current regime.
If you want to share control of that data with me—and say that the data represents something valuable (or is itself valuable somehow) and we don’t really trust each other not to tamper with it—then the classic “single server hosting data on the internet” doesn’t really do the trick.
If the number of people needing to collaborate is arbitrarily large, and includes people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other, then the only option for storing and updating shared state in a tamperproof and durable way is to use a consensus-replicated blockchain.
Does what happen a lot? People who might not know or trust each other needing to collaborate in updating and maintaining some kind of shared database? Yeah, it happens every day, everywhere, all the time.
In fact, it is exactly what you and I are doing right now. In our case, though, we happen to trust Y Combinator to mediate our exchange.
If our exchange were hosted on a blockchain, we wouldn't need to rely on Y Combinator to keep track of the upvotes and the downvotes, and to preserve our comments in their original form.
I'm fine with trusting Ycombinator with this exchange. These interactions are not important enough to warrant a costly amendment to a permanent record.
Can you provide examples where trustlessness is really necessary?
>The new thing is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial).
> Looks like you have run out of imaginary crypto coins. I guess that means you won't be able to participate on the internet until your next payday. Sucks to be you!
This is just a hater hatin, coming up with the worst ways to make web 3.0 look bad.
An example of a real value proposition of web 3.0 is spam protection and reduction of fake reviews. Much like how bitcoin itself cannot be counterfeited, utilization of the blockchain enables some guarantees in a digital world of endless copying.
The only thing I got from it was that the creator hates crypto bros so much he's willing to spend hours on end making an app to demonstrate why he's right.
Not only that but they're unaware that "Web 3.0" was the semantic web, envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee over a decade ago. The blockchain web is "web3", named after the library in Ethereum.
I didn't copypasta anything and have never been remotely close to a "bro" for my entire life. I'm a language and literature-loving school teacher, turned programmer.
I followed O'Reilly's Web 2.0 with great interest as a user of Flickr and Delicio.us, read about but didn't really get the whole Web 3.0 semantic web stuff, later learned how to program and much later still, learned about web3. If anything, it's my former language teacher side leading me to be irked by the Web 3.0 / web3 confusion.
Honestly, your comment is needlessly hostile and offensive.
> An example of a real value proposition of web 3.0 is spam protection and reduction of fake reviews.
How? It just costs money now.
Entities that want to spam and fake reviews, usually have money.
In fact, the more money someone is willing to throw at it, the more reviews they get to post. In fact, with enough resources, genuine reviews (which I would be reluctant to give as a user, as they cost additional money) can be comlpetely drowned out in this scenario.
If you don't want anything to be copied you just not copy it, no need to create all the complicated stuff. eg I can't copy my money in my bank even though it is a digital number.
I guess other than when they bought cryptocurrency as a speculative investment and outperformed probably almost every investment in history. I don't think buying crypto as a speculative investment is very exciting, but saying the people doing that have never been right isn't very convincing.
Depends on the price. $10-$50 for a standard eth tx surely not. But say the equivalent of ~$0.01, probably yes. This might be enough to disincentive _some_ (a lot of?) spamming (unfortunately it's all theory as no network works like this yet)
Gating using money inevitably means poor people cannot participate. It is quite simply a hard problem to solve (that I feel should not be solved this way). I've always been fond of how Korea does MMO accounts (supposedly): Government ID based, so if you get banned you are gone forever.
Now imagine living in Bangladesh, where the average yearly wage is around 1000 USD.
Is the opinion of some tech bro in the Bay Area making six figures really worth a hundred times as much? Do they have a hundred times as much to say or are they a hundred times as insightful?
Or maybe, just maybe, tying all participation to a monetary transaction is an incredibly classist thing to do that will shut out vast portions of the world so the rich and privileged can feel "free".
I don't have to pay to write comments, but I would likely have to lock up capital tied to an account while the comment is being rated, which can be lost permanently. Having an account with more verified comments can have a mark or rating of quality that can be queried off a blockchain outside of the centralized website that serves the data, which can be investigated independently by a user suspicious of centralized vote manipulation.
What users do when seeing comments from accounts that have lower signals of quality is up to the user to decide. If they would rather listen to voices from unverified accounts over ones that have higher signals that's for them to ultimately choose. No one will be required to necessarily lock up capital to comment, and no one will be required to only look at comments from those who locked up capital.
This is just an example I thought up of on the spot, but I believe there are people who actually did a much deeper dive into these concepts.
People don't just hate for the sake of hating. They see flaws and react to them... While some people just tell them not to worry about them because "they will be rewarded".
You think I don't see the flaws? I've been seeing all the Ponzis, P&D groups, shitcoins/memecoins, inflated prices around NFTs for the sake of flipping, scam ICOs and rug pulls, yields and stakes and the unfulfillable promises, and most importantly environmental impact of PoW.
Yet I still think benefits and the potential impact (which is not theoretical, just needing a bit more mass adoption to take off) greatly outweigh the negative sides.
Just because Blorkchains can solve a given problem, doesn't mean it's the best, or only solution. One could design a notetaking app using remote controlled combine-harvesters that mow the notes into prepared fields of wheat serving as storage media, and camera drones to read the information back. Doesn't mean it makes sense to do so.
> I still believe my example about freedom is still a perfect use case of it
How exactly does the blorkchain or "web3" achive that? There still needs to be a host for the webapps through which it's accessed. There still need to be DNS entries. The people acessing it are still doing so via ISPs. All these are gatekeepers, which an authoritarian regime has control over.
Gatekeepers don't go away just because the service decides to use a distributed ledger.
While in theory authorities could control everything obviously, if there are more real world apps that majority of the world starts using on those platforms, and more layers of protection something comparable to Tor, it will be inconvenient for state actors to block it all and they'll need to give up at some point or otherwise if they try to control they either lag behind by blocking it all or need to consume enormous resources to track people.
Oh BTW if you want people to take your comments more seriously you can stop deliberately misspelling names of technologies.
Well I wrote it all after seeing all the "good reason"s of people disliking it. I've been into crypto for almost 9 years and saw good and the bad sides of it, and result: I see no real reason for hating crypto other than missing the boat.
Criticizing is okay, there's a lot to criticize about crypto. But I see a rush of hatestorm on crypto everyday here on HN which I frankly think pointless.
I think if we've learned anything so far from this decade long experiment it's financialization incentivises spam and low quality content like nothing before! The best creative communities I've been involved in make a point to avoid financialization which in turn keeps away a certain group of people who only engage for money
FYI: proof of work for spam protection has been around since the late ’90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash. Bitcoin explicitly built on top of that work. In a vacuum, it’s a nice idea, but in practice the problems are more social than technical, and such solutions as these never pan out at scale. If you’re interested in learning more, read up on the term for this phenomenon (coined because enthusiastic proposals happen with monotonous regularity): Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem. https://www.dmuth.org/fussp/ is a decent starting point.
I put some money on a BTC Lightning wallet, now when I stream a podcast (creator to me), I stream satoshis/minute back. Literally value for value (I use Castamatic [0]). This was always the promise of defi for me. I'm glad it wasn't made illegal, it's starting to move into a useful domain where you can pay creators without friction and perhaps we can then finally get rid of ads (where we want) as the only viable model. I hope this can help indie podcasts from being gobbled up by Spotify, YouTube, etc.
And if you are afraid stuff will be unreachable for some people, the default for the podcasts are 40 sats/min (0.02 cents/min) atm. An yes, it is still difficult to get money into a Lightning wallet, I hope that will change.
These inventions only add to the freedom of creators to make their creations available under their own terms.
But now there's a dependency on some blockchain, and almost certainly some kind of centralized money conversion service... the content creator can't turn their fun crypto coins directly into food in their stomach or shelter over their heads.
> almost certainly some kind of centralized money conversion service
Most places have ways to exchange cryptocurrencies offline (using cold wallets), so this is already not the case. If you are lucky you can get a lot of things you need without transferring the money into another currency at all, which is the ideal scenario.
Build this into a browser, add 10$ a month to the wallet and automatically devide value over the websites you visit. If enough people would do it, it would be great for (independent) content creators.
308 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 407 ms ] threaddon't brush the valuable uses cases away. guaranteed immutability, integrity, and even anonymity, all of that through trustless networks that guarantee incentives for the maintainers of those network can't honestly be so narrowly represented.
Fun preview though of what will be mistakenly built on networks such as Eth that is nowhere near scalable for this kind of use case.
FYI modern chains cost less than a fraction of a penny to interact with (Avalanche, Matic, ICP) and some don't even require to pay anything (Ceramic). All these tired complaints are getting addressed and development is moving fast, it's about time the anti-web3 crowd catches up to it.
Also, I'd like the author to make welcome2web2, with popups, paywalls, ads and sudden user-hostile feature removal or UI redesigns meant to maximize profits... although it would be a pointless exercise, as one would just need to browse the web as usual to experience it.
If a website turns their UX user-hostile for whatever reason, one can simply build an alternative UI that interacts directly with the distributed data.
Oh, so web3 is for niche hobbyists?
How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?
How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?
More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?
Social trust networks -- they get recommended by friends or shared online by someone you trust.
> How can average user trust that the data on these alternative UIs isn't being manipulated?
Those same social trust networks -- someone realizes what's going on and shares it, people start telling other people to stop using it. There's no technological solution to prevent technological abuse -- the abuse can be built into the system, after all. Half the warnings about "stop using this site" are warnings about a first party UI -- "Facebook is reading your messages!" or "Youtube is hiding dislikes!" or whatever. Social networks (as in, networks of people, not websites) are the only way this sort of knowledge is ever spread.
> How long you think it will take until big sites would routinely do small tweaks to their databases/structures to systemically break these alternative UIs?
Not long, of course. I'm not sure if this is an argument in favor of Web3, though, since that can work the same way -- a startup needs to move fast and frequently change things to iterate, which means they will be changing the data representation on the blockchain frequently (going forward, of course they can't change past blocks), which means alternative clients will need to keep up with those data changes same as with API changes on a normal website.
> More so why would any of these for profit websites, like Youtube, even have a presence on web3?
? Web3 is just as for-profit as the normal web, if not more since every database interaction is monetized? YT and the like aren't on it because there aren't that many users.
And that won't even fix things like Youtube hiding dislikes or Facebook reading your messages. Even if your TotalyFreeYoutubeWithNoAds.com delivers on what it advertises you still need to interact with Youtube's APIs and if those don't deliver out dislikes then there is nothing you can do about it apart from creating your own parallel database with dislikes, but then you can only show the ones that come from your instance of Youtube and not ones that come from actual Youtube or from FreeYoutubeNoAds.com.
I haven't yet seen a single reason why normal consumer would use web3 over web2. Why would I pay for the privilege of responding to you or for downvoting bad ideas? Only response is "magically overnight all web2 websites transfer over to web3", but you have to be really out of touch with reality if you think that will happen in the first place and if it happens actual enthusiast won't create replacements for free on web2.
Web3 is literally just another cryptobro scam like NFTs and it is sad that anyone falls for them.
Have a good time at court I guess ?
Also, look up open-source. Your mind will be blown.
If your use-case requires some form of transfer, or proof of ownership of digital assets then blockchain is usually the most appropriate.
Most things branded as web3 aren't. Especially the recent bubble of art NFTs. That does not mean that the concept is pointless.
http://piped2bbch4xslbl2ckr6k62q56kon56ffowxaqzy42ai22a4sash...
Oh right, to make money.
I'd be glad to pay a penny (or a fraction of it) for each comment on HN or whatever and have it fund the network (server hosting, staff, etc). Much better than the current alternative.
Really? You'd prefer to pay for every single interaction on the web rather than be served an ad that you can block by the way anytime?
What about people that don't have the luxury to throw away their money like that, should the internet exclude poor people from participating?
Of course that expenditure has to be reasonable, ideally $1/day for intensive use or something affordable by everyone or trivially subsidizable, either externally or by participating in the network.
Costs ballooning out of proportion would be a problem of course, but the decentralized nature allows developers and users to move to another data provider once it proves it costs too much to operate (as it happened with Ethereum).
This comment I am making is not worth $.000000001 USD, it is worth exactly zero in whatever currency you want to denominate it in. $0 BTCH, $0 ETH, even $0 Zimbabwean Dollars. Take your pick.
It might even be worth a negative amount of currency since it is a mostly pointless comment and anyone who reads this has kind of had their time wasted. That is practically most of what is online IMO and why micro payments are an idea that have not and never will take off.
And why wouldn't we see this on the web3?
For one when was the last time you saw a popup? Probably not within the last 20 years.
Isn't everything in web3 by default behind a paywall?
What prevents a web3 website from changing it's UI?
If anything, web3 is more like the old internet without the web.. Distributed as in, everybody has a server in their pocket. It's your data, and you decide who has access to it.
That sounds nice. But what I read, web3 is intimitaley related to blockchains. I doubt that blockchains are necessary to obtain decentralisation and data ownership.
Sure, except everybody has access to read the blockchain.
I thought it was sarcasm
It's essentially the opposite of what HN is for.
Bitcoin is destroying the environment while providing no real decentralization since most people don't run their own clients. Other shitcoins are either outright scams or vulnerable to client forks like when Vitaly stole 150 million dollars.
After not actually solving currency, cryptobros moved to selling random pixels and now want to make the web an even worse place.
Not everyone wants that.
> What's the author trying to get out of making something like this?
You'd be surprised, but not everyone is trying to run a get-rich-quick scheme.
- Crypto is destroying the planet (it's not). A lot of people get irrationally mad about anything that causes any damage to the environment these days. Climate change is an incredibly important issue but the activism side of it is filled with a lot of crazy people and they've latched on to 'crypto' as bad when most don't know a thing about it.
- Jealousy. A lot of people got very lucky and very rich through crypto. They have so much ETH that can spend the equivalent of a persons expected lifetime earnings on a picture of a monkey. That's infuriating to a lot of people so much so they'll create websites that lack truth and nuance just to feel better about themselves.
It's understandable, but it's sad. Instead of HN being full of posts with people trying out new tech for the fun of it, we get endless miserable tirades from people trying to suck the joy out of life.
Also, most cryptocurrencies in fact do commit towards warming up the planet for no benefit at all. Don't know why you deny this.
Why do people need to be quiet for you? There's plenty of media I don't want to read and I don't read it. I don't try to silence it because it upsets me.
>> everything ever built by that scene needs to somehow make or cost money in some form or another, and that's a telling sign for me.
Making money directly by creating or building something was the norm until we started paying for it with our data. Paying for things directly and compensating creators doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
>> Also, most cryptocurrencies in fact do commit towards warming up the planet for no benefit at all. Don't know why you deny this.
I don't deny it but it's much more nuanced than that. As a society we do A LOT of unnecessary things which contribute to global warming and we don't get upset about them. Get off your computer. Stop watching TV. Stop using electricity. We could all get upset at each other or we could work towards solutions that solve the problem and allow us to maintain our current lifestyles with only minor modifications. The people screaming that crypto causes climate change are the same people who think the trees they're planting are the solution to it. In reality it's a much more complex problem that's going to be solved by the people that are too busy working on the possible solutions to waste time screaming. It's not black and white.
The word “equivalent” is doing a lot of work here; because if what you purchased was the nominal “rights” to a URL that may or may not 404 at any moment, you haven’t done anything worthy of jealousy.
Also, at the risk of breaking the HN rules on allegations of astroturfing: the whole narrative of “regular joes got super rich off this” is as turfy as it gets. I’ve looked at wallet balances, I understand a handful of these people exist. But I’ve never met one, and I doubt you have either. Some people win the lottery, too; I’m not losing sleep over it.
Maybe I'm not explaining it clearly enough. The jealousy isn't that you've been rich enough to buy a picture of a monkey. It's that you have so much 'money' that you can spend it on something so stupid and not even care. And the fact that you've gotten that money by doing something so seemingly stupid and worthless in the first place. That's pretty infuriating for a lot of people.
I also didn't mention 'regular joes'.
Yeah that's so irrational to get mad when something bad happens.
But..
a) who said that the point of web 3.0 is building social media platforms?
b) people in favour of blockchain tech already know that there are use cases that don't make sense to build on Layer 1 blockchains such as ETH, which is why there are numerous Layer 2 solutions being researched right now.
* can only be accessed through centralized DNS and Cloudflare (with no alternative way to get the front-end, e.g. ipfs, a git repo, or even a zip file with static assets that can be run locally)
* content only hosted on centralized server (unsplash.com / googleusercontent.com).
No sane person (even and especially the most ardent web3 proponents) would be proposing storing raw images on a blockchain for a use-case like this. There are far more suitable decentralized and/or distributed solutions for content distribution.
This is a strawman if I ever saw one.
https://web3.foundation/about/ (w3f skews heavily towards polkadot parachain solutions but look beyond the bias in their examples and it's quite representative)
http://piped2bbch4xslbl2ckr6k62q56kon56ffowxaqzy42ai22a4sash...
What's perhaps even more fun to think about is that somewhere in a lofty corner office at Instagram there's someone with a math or compsci PhD doing calculations to figure out exactly how much every Post, Story, Like and comment costs to post on Insta, and precisely how often an advert needs to be displayed to cover that. At least with micro-transactions there's no adverts (in theory I mean, of course there would still be adverts) and it's all very obvious how you're paying.
pathetic.
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Hmm,
Meet the new web. Same as the old web. I'll pass. Thanks.
EDIT: I guess I didn't see it was joke site, because the web technology is also a joke. Oh joy!
TCP/IP over smoke signals would make a great RFC in a couple weeks. ;)
I like the idea, I'm just worried about the CO2 released.
Then again, if the alternative is tons of bird-cr&! everywhere, it may be the better way.
It sparked an emotion and for me that makes something art.
This is why cryptos are here to stay. The underlying technology is valuable and the problems it may have today can be overcome.
Software isn't some magic that can wish away its shorcomings.
Also, do you think the next instagram that will most like support its own crypto will allow you to switch to a different crypto?
ETA: the transaction cost is based on the cryptocurrency, so if now the cost per transaction is 1 cent then in 10 years it might cost 10 dollars if the value of the coin goes up.
Also, who cares if there are several cryptocurrencies? If they have good properties (fundamentals) and people find them valuable, why not?
The fact that they are unable to ignore them and continue to spread the same debunked nonsense tells you that it is not going away and it is getting boring.
Just look at the first few sentences:
> a slow distributed, append only spreadsheet technology which is destroying the planet we live on.
So Solana, Stellar and Algorand are destroying the planet?
> Blockchain isn't new. It has been around for as long as the iPhone. Look how much the iPhone has changed the world. Blockchains one claim to fame in this period is the creation of $5.2B/year ransomware industry, societal damage in the form of gambling and the loss of irreplaceable photos.
The internet isn't new. Its 'killer app' (The world wide web) came decades afterwards and it took decades more for adoption. I don't know why one would try to use ransomware on transparent and traceable blockchains these days, where everyone can see where it is going, unless you are using 'privacy coins' which those are getting banned due to regulations.
All of that did not stop Stripe to continue supporting cryptocurrencies for payments [0], did it? It's really getting boring repeating the same old arguments from critics like Stephen Diehl [1] who is unable to ignore the whole thing after his failed blockchain startup venture Adjoint. [2] That's why he is grieving and wasting his energy towards cryptocurrencies.
[0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto
[1] https://twitter.com/smdiehl
[2] https://twitter.com/dystopiabreaker/status/14701269278180679...
The Internet started in the mid 1980s and became available to consumers in about '89[0]. The WWW was created in '90. By '94 it was wildly popular. Netscape IPOed the next year, with millions of users.
Generously, you could call that about 5 years from public availability to cultural dominance. Bitcoin has existed for three times that, and still doesn't have a use case that Beanie Babies didn't have.
I'm a believer in cryptocurrencies - or, I should say, in decentralised digital cash. But people like you are hurting it, not helping it. We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.
[0] Incidentally, David Chaum founded DigiCash, the first cryptocurrency company, the same year.
If you ask me, the story of the internet and cryptocurrencies seems pretty similar.
Aside from that, I very much agree with you. I think digital cash has great promise - I can't imagine Visa and Mastercard still being a thing in 20-30 years. Some implementation of digital cash - I happen to think Bitcoin and its current siblings are not fit solutions - seems highly likely to proliferate in actual means-of-exchange usage. (In plain English: for buying stuff at supermarkets.)
But I think people like the commenter above are the obstacle to progress. We need motivated but rational innovators, who can analyse solutions through clear eyes, soberly and without dysfunctional ego investment in one technology or another.
These weird crypto stans are not technologists, they're fanboys, they make real innovators look bad, and they retard real progress by dementedly screaming at anyone who makes cogent criticisms of a given implementation. Those critics are our greatest asset and friend, not our enemy.
You think the blockchain is going to give you a credit limit?
As for credit limits: first off, Visa and Mastercard are payment systems - they don’t give you credit limits. Your card has ‘Visa’ or ‘Mastercard’ written on it, but it’s your bank that lends you the money to spend via V/M. I’m not proposing that the bank be replaced - I’m proposing that the payment system be replaced. Your bank will lend you money, and you will spend it using [tbd].
(BTW, I developed the lending algorithms at a unicorn startup bank. Billions in credit was dispensed by my code [and that of my reports]. I’m intimately familiar with that ecosystem. It’s not my central point here, but I do believe there’s substantial room for modernisation in that respect at almost every point in the chain: the CRAs, the lenders, the collections agencies, etc. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to expand, but right here I don’t want to distract from my actual point above.)
The time between the web opening and the end of the dot-com boom is about the same as the time between Bitcoin being announced and Ethereum going live, a period in which barely anyone used crypto and it had almost zero impact on the world. Even since then its wider impact is minute compared to what came from the dot-com boom.
> But people like you are hurting it, not helping it.
How exactly?
> We need rational discussion that can soberly evaluate the flaws of a given implementation, not unthinking heavily-emotionalised tribalism.
I have just counter argued my points made with real examples and evidence and the only person arguing with emotion are the creators of the 'Welcome to Web 3.0' page. And yes, I can even critique the aforementioned cryptocurrencies since every technology still always has it issues.
But just don't repeat the same arguments that I have just refuted. It is boring and I am only interested in looking for new criticisms. All my earlier points and questions about it being, slow, 'destroying the planet', etc still remain unchallenged.
Is it though? Valuable how? Has it been proven?
The core of the issue is that PoW is fundamentally a sort of algorithmic cancer that threatens to basically take over on the order of half of the worlds computational power to fuel worthless speculative trading. IMO there's an important argument to be had that trading on PoW blockchains should be outright banned. Yes, you can't get rid of it completely, but you can get the impact down to a manageable level.. like with cancers.
And yeah, then you have PoS and PoA blockchains. But it's yet to be proven that PoS provides the same level of security as PoW, and there's solid arguments that it never possibly could. PoA is fundamentally different from PoW and PoS, so you can argue whether it's even the same underlying thing. It's no longer truly decentralized. I think it could be very useful. It's just not as sexy and susceptible to fueling pyramid schemes, so it's less popular.
So to me it seems like we really don't know at all yet if the "underlying technology" is even providing a net positive value to society.
If the "underlying technology" here is trustless distributed blockchains (that is, PoA doesn't really apply), then I think there's an argument that the core of the idea is fundamentally broken. There is perhaps no such thing as a truly trustless system (for PoW/PoS blockchain, you're just converging on concentrating de-facto trust with a small clique of trading platforms and mining/wallet app developers), so maybe it's better to just be more explicit about where we're placing our trust (through solid cryptography if we can) and to make sure that those entities are democratic institutions worthy of our trust. But this quickly becomes a very deep and philosophical argument, so it's outside the scope of this comment.
I support further research and development into blockchain-related technology, I certainly think it could be truly valuable. But it's yet to be proven IMO.
Could you direct me to some of these arguments? My thought is the opposite, that something in the lines of PoS is more secure in the long-run because it tends towards decentralization. I guess the devil is in the details.
In order for validators to distinguish the main fork from any malicious long forks, they must start with a trusted checkpoint that's less than X days old, then sync at least every X days, where X is the unbonding period.
The "trusted checkpoint" notion seems to cause a lot of concern, but in my mind it's relatively harmless to just bake checkpoints into the client code (if done carefully - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29370309). Most clients already have some form of trusted checkpoints (even Bitcoin Core does, though they're deprecated), or at least a genesis block, which is effectively a checkpoint.
More here: https://eth.wiki/en/concepts/proof-of-stake-faqs#what-is-wea...
And some good discussion here: https://twitter.com/zooko/status/1045807027992182785
I'm pretty sure that's been said about email and its encryption/validation problem. And while it's still used, other products have come in and eaten its biggest market - asynchronous communication.
Inertia's a bitch, and when you have millions of users, you can't change things willy-nilly. At least, not if you want the product to be viewed as legitimate.
The web evolved constantly from birth and became more interactive over time.
I always hated that silly “web 2.0” branding.
"Web2" makes us think that we can delete whatever we post, or what we send is not going to be stored. And we believe it because it is technically possible, even though we don't have any way to double check.
If a service claims that you can delete/hide whatever data you uploaded on the blockchain, you'd be able to verify it and not only trust them. And if you are told that using this service, there is no way to delete it, and that anybody can see it, you might avoid doing something that you'd have done with web2 and regretted later.
Given that the the two most important features of a blockchain are decentralization and immutability how would any service ever be able to guarantee me that? That implies they own the blockchain, in which case it's just a slow database.
The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.
Can a judge order you to do something that is not possible? For example, if you were offering an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, can the judge order you to provide a decrypted version of a user's correspondence?
> The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.
Yes, I think that's why Balaji Srinivasan is talking about "network states", and "layer 0" (the ideological and legal layer) of cryptocurrencies.
Certainly. Here’s a relevant explanatory comment that I wrote a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23632398.
Contempt of court is an exceptionally powerful instrument. If the law says you must remove things on request, what were you doing putting stuff in a place that you couldn’t remove them? And if the law says you must provide such-and-such information to the police on presentation of a court order, “I can’t because I designed it so I couldn’t” is not an acceptable defence. So far, these things have been flying under the radar for the most part, but it wouldn’t take much for them to be explicitly banned on the grounds that they make it impossible to comply with law.
Web3 seems to work the opposite way. The tech works like that, so the world better adapt to it.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but for once I'm happy that it's not technicians that make the laws.
Seriously though, this is just a cheap shot at the web3/cryptography/cryptocurrency/de* space.
The new thing is that we can now enforce invariants on state transitions in a decentralized manner for a limited set of applications (mostly financial).
With all the capital inflow thanks to the various crypto bubbles there is an insane amount of cryptography and distributed systems research going on to let us build general purpose decentralized databases in the future.
Once we get there, it’ll obviously change all of our assumptions about the internet which are based on companies controlling centralized databases.
The "magic" provided by bitcoins was the "proof of work" part - basically trying to create only one "real" trusted branch of the markov chain at any point in time. But that "reality" has been broken multiple times by both the miners and the programers with voluntary and involuntary splits, double spends, etc.
> A Merkle tree provides an efficient way to compute hashes (not signatures)
A signature is a hash, in that it is effectively unique for the content. It simply has the additional property of being generated using cryptographic keys, proving that not only is the hashed content what's expected, it was generated using the specified key.
Though if we really feel it's necessary, we could simply say "a merkle-tree like implementation that uses cryptographic signatures in place of a hash function".
Pedantry about the difference between hashes and signatures doesn't change the validity of the structure as a response to the original question.
Alice and Bob both use asymmetric keys, and use one of a thousand different methods to exchange their public keys (hey, they can even go in the Merkle tree). Alice signs a transaction using her private key and publishes it. Bob can now use Alice's public key to verify the signature on the transaction. No private/secret key exposure.
Asymmetric encryption is a fairly well explored field, which is what makes the above both easy to reason about and secure.
I'm hosting cat photos for friends to view. There are no invariants. There are no rules. It's purely content I'm posting for other people to consume. It's no different than if I printed photos and mailed them to all the people.
Every financial transaction that requires settlement between institutions is a “coordinated mutation.”
And while it is true that financial transactions are often synced between institutions via a “batched mutation” approach (especially when coordinating settlement), the delay that batched settlement represents, and the complexity that it introduces to the overall system, is extremely costly.
This is one reason why blockchains have the potential to be extremely valuable—both from a utilitarian point of view as well as from a financial point of view.
Imagine if you could get rid of batched settlement between institutions, because you just didn’t need to do it anymore. What would that be worth?
Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere from 10 minutes to upwards of 16 hours for minuscule volumes of transactions. It's not solving that problem for certain.
> extremely costly
The cost is built into the transactions. Just like it is with blockchain transactions. Now then, which has higher per transaction costs?
As a factual matter, settlement costs are not fully embodied by transaction fees, and include such things as, for instance, financing and opportunity costs and the cost of supporting an organization that is more complex than it otherwise needs to be. If settlement delays were entirely eliminated, new business models would emerge that are not even possible under the current regime.
If the number of people needing to collaborate is arbitrarily large, and includes people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other, then the only option for storing and updating shared state in a tamperproof and durable way is to use a consensus-replicated blockchain.
But how do cryptographic signatures protect you from surreptitious deletions?
On their own, they do not. They are a necessary, but insufficient part of the solution.
In fact, it is exactly what you and I are doing right now. In our case, though, we happen to trust Y Combinator to mediate our exchange.
If our exchange were hosted on a blockchain, we wouldn't need to rely on Y Combinator to keep track of the upvotes and the downvotes, and to preserve our comments in their original form.
Can you provide examples where trustlessness is really necessary?
Lol, this has to be ironic.
> Looks like you have run out of imaginary crypto coins. I guess that means you won't be able to participate on the internet until your next payday. Sucks to be you!
roflmao
An example of a real value proposition of web 3.0 is spam protection and reduction of fake reviews. Much like how bitcoin itself cannot be counterfeited, utilization of the blockchain enables some guarantees in a digital world of endless copying.
The only thing I got from it was that the creator hates crypto bros so much he's willing to spend hours on end making an app to demonstrate why he's right.
Web 3.0 and web3 are very different ideas.
I followed O'Reilly's Web 2.0 with great interest as a user of Flickr and Delicio.us, read about but didn't really get the whole Web 3.0 semantic web stuff, later learned how to program and much later still, learned about web3. If anything, it's my former language teacher side leading me to be irked by the Web 3.0 / web3 confusion.
Honestly, your comment is needlessly hostile and offensive.
How? It just costs money now.
Entities that want to spam and fake reviews, usually have money.
In fact, the more money someone is willing to throw at it, the more reviews they get to post. In fact, with enough resources, genuine reviews (which I would be reluctant to give as a user, as they cost additional money) can be comlpetely drowned out in this scenario.
To be fair, hating crypto bros is a really good way of life. Mostly because crypto bros have never once in their life been right.
Would someone who has a monetary incentive to comment pay to do so?
We already have a solution to this problem: It's the internet as it is right now.
Is the opinion of some tech bro in the Bay Area making six figures really worth a hundred times as much? Do they have a hundred times as much to say or are they a hundred times as insightful?
Or maybe, just maybe, tying all participation to a monetary transaction is an incredibly classist thing to do that will shut out vast portions of the world so the rich and privileged can feel "free".
What users do when seeing comments from accounts that have lower signals of quality is up to the user to decide. If they would rather listen to voices from unverified accounts over ones that have higher signals that's for them to ultimately choose. No one will be required to necessarily lock up capital to comment, and no one will be required to only look at comments from those who locked up capital.
This is just an example I thought up of on the spot, but I believe there are people who actually did a much deeper dive into these concepts.
There is no inherent fake news protection, just like pointers don’t validate the underlying data.
We're exactly at that period with web3: haters gonna hate and early adopters will be rewarded.
Yet I still think benefits and the potential impact (which is not theoretical, just needing a bit more mass adoption to take off) greatly outweigh the negative sides.
Just because Blorkchains can solve a given problem, doesn't mean it's the best, or only solution. One could design a notetaking app using remote controlled combine-harvesters that mow the notes into prepared fields of wheat serving as storage media, and camera drones to read the information back. Doesn't mean it makes sense to do so.
On the other hand, I still believe my example about freedom is still a perfect use case of it and I don't know other ways of doing it.
How exactly does the blorkchain or "web3" achive that? There still needs to be a host for the webapps through which it's accessed. There still need to be DNS entries. The people acessing it are still doing so via ISPs. All these are gatekeepers, which an authoritarian regime has control over.
Gatekeepers don't go away just because the service decides to use a distributed ledger.
Oh BTW if you want people to take your comments more seriously you can stop deliberately misspelling names of technologies.
This is a thought terminating idea, as much as I like TS. There is a good reason why people dislike it. Maybe consider understanding their points
Criticizing is okay, there's a lot to criticize about crypto. But I see a rush of hatestorm on crypto everyday here on HN which I frankly think pointless.
web 3.0 is fakery
And if you are afraid stuff will be unreachable for some people, the default for the podcasts are 40 sats/min (0.02 cents/min) atm. An yes, it is still difficult to get money into a Lightning wallet, I hope that will change.
These inventions only add to the freedom of creators to make their creations available under their own terms.
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/castamatic-podcast-player/id96...
Edited: Typo
No more dependence on payment providers? True per minute payment? Near 0 fees?
Most places have ways to exchange cryptocurrencies offline (using cold wallets), so this is already not the case. If you are lucky you can get a lot of things you need without transferring the money into another currency at all, which is the ideal scenario.